At night, among the trees, a dark bull stands alone, snorting and bellowing, feeling watched, sensing our presence. Is it the same bull, or does it change when the camera angle shifts? Surely I am mistaken, and its intentions are different, but to me, that horned creature staring at us as if in a mirror is a warning that what is coming next cannot be dealt with by reason alone.
Tardes de soledad (Albert Serra, 2024) is not a character documentary, although, as the synopsis and reviews say, it follows Roca Rey and Roca Rey appears in almost every shot. In a space to which we will return again and again, except in this initial scene, without a suit, he is presented to us in white and as a bullfighter, white in the next shot crossed with bull’s blood as if it were his own. Without a biopic, with a sparse personality and always just out of a trance or on the verge of returning to it, he is a vehicle, not a character.
Nor does his team express much more than oles to his balls and the truth with which he bullfights. Because this string of afternoons, bulls, and bullfighters’ costumes, with their before and after, anti-intellectual, unreflective in the peaks of Roca Rey’s facial contortions to the point of almost becoming animalistic, hide a truth. Truth made up of feints, tricks or luck, passes, verónicas… My bullfighting jargon is limited to the basics, but it is not necessary to know José Bergamín’s El arte de birlibirloque (The Art of Birlibirloque) or to have witnessed a bullfight to be affected by Tardes de soledad.
It focuses on what Roca is in the ring, shot from below, transfigured into something almost divine. Away from the bull, in the minibus to and from the ring, in the impersonality of hotels, he is monosyllabic, uttering brief set phrases, uncomfortable with a spotlight or the delay of an elevator. Roca Rey never appears in civilian clothes; the most intimate thing we see of him is him adjusting his much-talked-about balls in his fuchsia Lycra, a cross around his neck and a weeping Virgin Mary on his dresser. Then, rather than putting on a suit (his “sword bearer,” as I just googled, is what it’s called, he fastens it by lifting it up), there are hints of investiture, and “all investiture is a magical garment that clothes man with something extra-human that he lacks” (María Zambrano).
Let’s pause, as the film pauses, in the elevator hall, in the wait and descent of just over a minute that feels like hours and how much it contrasts with the five minutes or so of the final luck of the spotted bull, which refuses to die and is finished off by Roca. Facing the golden doors of the elevator is an extravagant feathered creature unfit for our ordinary life.
This enchantment vanishes when he is gored and lets out a broken cry, and the man who is still the bullfighter crawls, rolls around, and turns pale. The bullfighter calls the bull, his feet alert, his sword raised, a fierce and crazy grimace and that specific, always identical scream exalting the supreme luck.
The bullfighter turns his back and the front legs give way, the bull collapses, but he still lingers in the eyes that do not fade from the camera. Ears! Ears! We hear the hungry crowd around us, which throughout Tardes de soledad remains in the background, or sneaks in, disturbing the background, or is cornered in this or that shot. They are random, murmurs, olés, hurras! and vivas! to the genitals, which are very much present in the minds of the bullfighter and the bull, but never in the camera, which never strays from what it came to do.
To an anti-bullfighting sensibility, as to any anti-religious sensibility, art such as this, in which the bull is impaled at 29′, 45′, 59′, 103′ and 117′, will surely sound like barbarism, neurosis, repulsion. Are not all bulls the bull, and does not death come every time to the bullfighter we see repeatedly leaving on his own two feet? It has been known since ancient times: without sacrifice, the sacred does not manifest itself, or was it the divine? Is there any sacredness left today in this ritually repeated crime? It is debatable, and the greedy camera of Tardes de soledad, which does not overlook a single detail of the vivid death of the victim, suggests that it is.
To appreciate the discovery and allure achieved by Serra and Artur Tort (DP), contrast it with any bullfight broadcast by Onetoro TV or uploaded to social media, or any film ever made about bullfighting. Its proximity, at times magnifying the reds and golds, magnifies and immerses the viewer in the solitude that surrounds the bullfighter’s dance, rather than the spectacle itself. Azorín is more succinct, repeating with him, but referring to Tardes de soledad: “El arte de birlibirloque is a collection of aphorisms and essays in defense of art in bullfighting, and not of bullfighting itself.”
